Mobile communications solutions are increasingly becoming more packet based and converge towards Internet based applications and users roam packet based networks. There is also an increasing supply and demand of different types of applications used in these types of networks and there is an interest to make these applications available also to mobile communication platforms such as smart phones, Internet enabled phones, laptops and other mobile computing equipment. However, operators need to control the data traffic in order to provide good Service of Quality (QoS) and balance this with the costs of maintaining and building communication infrastructure. Operators have an interest in providing differentiated charging depending on applications used or type of communication traffic; for instance to differentiate between web surfing using html based information, email traffic, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), gaming, and other applications/protocols.
Current charging solutions, for instance in gateway support nodes, e.g. GGSN, are based on configuration of the packet identification pointing out different charging identifiers. Charging identifiers are, except for the mobile device identifiers, typically Service Identifier (SI) and Rating Group (RG). These charging identifiers are 32 bit in length, even though the some solutions only support 4096 simultaneous identifiers for the SI.
Manual configuration of rules for applications complicates the introduction of new third party services, since a service level agreement (SLA) need to be negotiated between the operator and the application provider and new configuration need to be added to the nodes. To enable fast roll-out of services an automated solution for this is desired.